Friday, September 04, 2015

Refugees in Budapest: Not a Proud Day for Hungary.

Yesterday we went to Keleti train station.
Thousands of refugees mill around the station and in the lower level, which was
designated a transit zone, but is in reality a temporary refugee camp. Humanitarian aid, information, and basic services are all supplied by civilian
volunteers through the Migration Aid stand. No Churches, Red Cross, charities…
and certainly not the government. The Budapest city provides only one water tap
for thousands in the middle of a heat wave.

The full extent of Mayor Tarlos' generosity.

The Hungarian government and the
City of Budapest have stated that the refugees “should not have come here” and
are not entitled to any help or care whatsoever. It is an astonishing lack of
empathy, considering the fact that in 1956 hundreds of thousands of Hungarians
arrived in Austria fleeing unrest under similar conditions. (But they were
white, of course.) If not for the kindness
and generosity of Hungarian civilians, this would be a full on humanitarian catastrophe
zone. We dropped off a couple of loads of apples and bananas and walked through
the protected tranzit zone – set up to protect the refugees from attacks by
Hungarian right wing radicals who started making appearances about three weeks
ago.

The generous response of Hungarian and foreign individuals have been overwhelming.

Hungarians love it when their nation is in
the headlines, but they were not prepared for the international media showing
the suffering crowds at Keleti station and reporting on the increasingly cynical
ploys of the Hungarian government to fool or entrap these people into
overcrowded camps. Yesterday the
bait-and-switch game which lured refugees onto trains aimed at talking them to
collection camps led to a headline in the Hungarian portal 444.hu to exclaim “What
the Hungarian government is doing to the Refugees is Complete Scumbaggery “ The refugees are exhausted, traumatized, and hungry. They do not want to stay
in Hungary… and, for the Syrians at least, they have been promised sanctuary if
they can reach Germany. I have been getting calls from all over the world
asking “What is the Hungarian Government trying to do?

Young guys leave the shade to families and children.

OK. Let me try and explain. The
Hungarian government is, in effect, the FIDESZ party. There is virtually no
opposition. Forget all the other parties, Hungary is a FIDESZ joint. And FIDESZ
is the party of Viktor Orban. That is the entire ideology of FIDESZ in a nutshell.
Got it? Viktor wakes up in the morning, says some things during the day, and
that becomes the party ideology and the Will of the Hungarian People. It is
essentially a one party system and a one-man party. (I am sure that there are FIDESZ folks who
would argue with this point, because FIDESZ is full of young country lawyers
who have never held an actual job, so they will argue endlessly about this
point, and many others, such as why they can’t let refugees leave the country
to Germany. They love arguing.)

FIDESZ has refused to use the term "refugees: they are economic migrants in the eyes of Orban's troll brigade.

Orban does a lot of things that make him
newsworthy in a Lex Luther kind of way… far too many to list here. But last
winter Orban and FIDESZ got buried balls deep in a financial scandal involving
the Quaestor Brokerage House, and it looked like the FIDESZ Empire was
cracking, at least in the polls. In the
wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris, FIDESZ inspired response was to launch
a new Public Relations campaign alerting Hungarians to a new threat to their
beleaguered society: Refugees, particularly economic refugees who were coming
to take Hungarian jobs away and spread Islamic terror. The PR campaign spent
millions on roadside ads to troll the official xenophobic view, which was
quickly taken up in the countryside. This was well before the unexpected flood
of Syrians that chose to leave their war-torn land during the summer.

Utter exhaustion with little hope from the authorities.

Orban’s beef is mainly with the EU. Why?
Because there is a lot of money in the EU, but they attach conditions to
getting it. Orban doesn’t like conditions: he often declares that the EU
insults the “honor of the Hungarian People” by asking what ever happened to
some billions of EUROS it thought it had spent on a highway or something or
other. Orban actually had a twelve million dollar (private donations, of course!) football stadium built in his own village, more or less in his back yard. When the EU started saying that Hungary had to accommodate refugees
crossing into Schengen Europe via its Serbian border, Orban simply refused. Hungary couldn't afford it! Hungary would not accept any refugees –
especially non-Christian refugees. The refugee crisis is “a German problem”
said Orban.

Germany yes! Hungary, No!

Hungary is not a target for the
refugees. None want to remain here. All you have to do is pick up a copy of the
Economist in Istanbul and you can figure out it pays better to be a fast food
worker slinging doner kebab in Frankfurt than to be a nurse or teacher in Budapest. The deaths of 71
Syrians in a truck found across the border in Austria focused attention on the
problem: if the refugees can’t move forward in a legitimate way, they will seek
whatever means are available to them to get out of Hungary, including the very
real danger of refugee smugglers. . They may not know where they are going, but
they certainly know where they are fleeing from. As one refugee said “Nobody
puts their wife and child in a boat unless they truly have to.”

Many of the families from Syria have nothing to return to.

Today several hundred of the refugees
decided that they wouldn’t wait for trains any longer. They set off by foot
from Keleti station to walk to the Austrian border. It will take two or three
days, and I suspect they will encounter a a trap by the police and border guards someplace
along the line. Because... Hungary! Tomorrow, Austrian activists are planning a convoy of buses and
cars to help refugees get across the border into Austria. Five have already
been arrested in Hungary and charged with refugee smuggling. The Czech Republic
and Slovakia have eased border controls to simplify the flow of Syrians to
Germany. And in Hungary Our Great Leader is busy pointing his finger and
blaming Muslims, the USA, the Germans, any cause that relieves him of the responsibility
of making a simple humanitarian decision.

Demonstrators were glad to attract attention to their message.

Yes, it is sick. It is a combination
of misplaced pride, megalomania, and paranoia that drive Orban: the cameras are
on him, and he must not fail. But in the back of his mind, there is always the
fear… in 1964 Richard Hofstadter published the essay “The Paranoid Style inAmerican Politics” which examined the role of religious intolerance in two hundred years of American political
discourse. It ends: “A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable
things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.
It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He
has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness,
but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten
him—and in any case he resists enlightenment… We are all sufferers from
history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only
by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

Many of the refugees are Kurds displaced by ISIS.

There is a Hungarian joke that goes: "What is the difference between a Hungarian optimist and a Hungarian pessimist" The Hungarian pessimist says "It can't get worse than this!" The Hungarian optimist says "Yes! It can!"

One refugee has died today trying to escape the refugee camp in Bicske. It will get worse before it
gets better.

8 comments:

Thank you for this - it explains to me in simple terms how the will of the people in Hungary has been subverted by it's leader. I honor what ordinary citizens there are doing - it does your country proud to see it.

Hungary is simply playing the bad guy in the EU now. And our prime minister is good enough for this. That's Orbán's job inspired by Merkel. Hungary is evil, and when the refugees will arrive to Germany, they will tought: this is Mekka after Hungary's madness. But. 2 years later, when the neo-nazis movement, and the german illusion is going to fly away, they are going to see, who is the real bad guy...

I live in hungary, i was born here, and see all things, what you didnt. start with "the lack of simpathy": we cared for these people, our government insured food, drinks, games for little kids. Our prime minister unfortunatelly, pay more for these things for migrants than for the hungarian hospitals to care for the patients, but i know, it is not the migrants' fault or decision.

I would like to mention the fact that these people in other countries like in france or sweden just did huge crimes, for example in sweden there is the highest number of rapes because of "only" the religion..they feel that white women, who just do not covered they are free, it is not misdeed... or in france, now there is a whole part of it where muslims are living and crime without any consequences and just kick the white women and men, because of they are WHITE. (of course)

please just watch that video, where hungarian polices take fresh waters for the migrants and they just kick it and blow it out... arent we fair with them??? in russia they would just shooted for it and thats all.. do not say we are not feel with them or do not care with these "poor" people because we did... and one more thing: yes, our prime minister is not the best, but we can not do anything else.. he is not same with us! we just feel the same but not do the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L3eSbpETf8

and you can say that these people did things because of fear, but now we afraid this whole thing too, and we do not really want to come more foreign people, who just can not live with us in piece and do not respect our religion, our law or anything else.

Your government - which, incidentally, is my government - gave nothing. The video was produced by the Hungarian police: it comes from "Police Hungary" youtube page. That video shows food being offered to people on a Hunger strike. it has been making the rounds all over facebook whenever somebody criticizes FIDESZ for its lack of humanity in handling the refugee crisis. So I am simply going to treat you "Henrietta" as just one more szarhazi troll and you deserve all our contempt. Ignorant troll!